


lighting

by Anemoi



Category: Green Street Hooligans | Hooligans (2005)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-02
Updated: 2015-08-02
Packaged: 2018-04-12 12:13:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4478846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anemoi/pseuds/Anemoi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pete’s buried on a Saturday in the plot next to his dad, rainy, slightly nippy wind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	lighting

**Author's Note:**

> im wrecked over a 10 year old movie about football hooligans.

   

 

 

  Pete’s buried on a Saturday in the plot next to his dad, rainy, slightly nippy wind. Matt huddles deeper in to his jacket. A surprising amount of people showed up, an uneasy mix of both the GSE and parents of the kids Pete taught at school. Steve doesn’t say a word, standing by the graveside staring off in to the distance like he wasn’t really there. He hugs Matt, but perfunctorily, not meeting his eyes.

   He stays till long after the service is over. It’s early afternoon and the clouds have dissipated, gold light on the freshly turned over dirt of the new grave.

   He stares at the headstone for a long time. But it was just a stone. Pete’s gone, and so he stumbles back to their apartment and gets his bags and goes to the airport 27 hours early for his flight, unable to stand the silence, the way the light caught on the West Ham United flag, the mug with still an inch of moldy tea and Pete’s smudged fingerprints on the side.

 

-

 

 Pete’s buried on Saturday in the plot next to his dad, and Matt sees him again in Boston. Starbucks, actually. He drops his coffee to the floor and runs.

 

-

 

 It happens again, this time when Matt’s sitting in a restaurant with Carl. Carl’s running a finger down the menu and suggesting things they might want to order _(I hear the lobster is pretty good, but how do you feel about seafood, hmm, Matt?)_ and Matt looks over his shoulder and Pete’s right there, sitting by the window, hands folded. Pete looks at him, not smiling, just staring. He did that – used to do that- a lot, right before he grins and breaks a bottle over someone’s head. The waitress reaches through him to get someone’s check and Matt has to get up.

   “Sorry. Sorry- Carl. Dad. I just- have. I have to go.”

   Carl doesn’t even look surprised, although he frowns and he says, “Alright. Matt. Look after yourself, okay?”

   “Okay. Dad.”

  “Okay. Matt, I didn’t even talk to you about what you’re going to do with your life, have you thought about writing what happened in England down-“

  Matt pushes back his chair and runs.

 

-

 

He didn’t want to write what happened in England down. Scratch that, he’d already written everything in England down, but he wasn’t going to do anything with it. 40 pages of it printed out and heavy in his drawer. He’d thought about symbolically getting rid of it, and drag and dropping the folder to the trash can on his desktop just hadn’t felt like enough.

   He hadn’t written anything since. He couldn’t write anything because Pete was following him around. Pete’s ghost, Pete’s undead spirit, whatever it was that looked like Pete and wouldn’t leave him alone.

  

  He googles it, half ashamed. “Can’t stop seeing a dead person.” The results that came up were either morbid or saccharine. _I saw my husband standing at the doorway and he said, “I just want to thank you for everything, Liz, I love you.”_

 Well fuck, then. Pete’s ghost isn’t saying anything at all.

 

-

 

    Matt goes to Starbucks because it has air conditioning and summer in Boston was fucking unbearable. Shannon’s offered to let him live with her for- _for a bit, at least, come on Matt-_ and Shannon’s able to afford an apartment with air conditioning from Steve’s money wired over across the Atlantic, but Matt couldn’t bear to see her. He gets the feeling that Shannon wanted to sit down and talk about what happened, arrive at some sort of cathartic end where they fall in to each other’s arms and cry about the people they loved and lost.

    Matt doesn’t want to talk. Matt doesn’t want. He gets up at 6 am for his job at a moving company and he finishes at 6pm and he goes to Starbucks till it closes and then he goes to bed with 2 fans set up blowing in his face.

    It’s almost okay, until Pete shows up.

 

-

 

  “What do you want?” He turns around and spits it at Pete, who’s picking up a bag of coffee beans and hefting them in a hand, lips moving like he was reading the ingredients on the back. Pete raises his eyebrows at him, smirking a little like he was saying, _careful there Yank, watch your tone._

   His words crash in to the coffee shop murmur like a gunshot or a glass bottle hitting the wall.

   “Sir-“ the barista starts, but Matt’s already turning away, face hot. He forces himself to leave the Starbucks walking, then breaks in to a run on the sidewalk. Pete doesn’t follow, but when Matt looks up on the subway he’s sitting in the empty seat across from him.

  “What do you want?” Matt says again, defeated.

  Pete shrugs. He’s still wearing his ring on his middle finger. He’d said that the only reason he wore it was because it hurt more when he punched people, but Matt knew it was his dad’s. His dad’s, who passed it on to Steve, who gave it to Pete, along with a legacy and a firm and a destiny.

  _It’s in my blood._ Pete had declared happily to Matt after telling him this one night, pissed out of their minds. _Born for this. Prob’ly die for this._

  Matt should have known, running with someone who wore so much of his blood outside of him for so much of the time. Theirs isn’t the kind of story that didn’t end in someone bleeding out in the dirt.

 

-

  Carl leaves him voicemail every other week. _Are you going to be flipping burgers for the rest of your life, Matt? It’s time to move on. Please. Come talk to my colleague, I’ve told him a bit about what you went through in Engl-_

  Matt deletes them all.

 

-

 

   Pete shows up everywhere, with increasing frequency. Across the table at a diner with lemon yellow walls, in the bus stop while it’s pouring outside, on every road he walks, keeping step with Matt, silent.

    Matt misses his voice. When he realizes this it’s as though he was suddenly run over by a train, no warning. He veers off the path he’s been walking on and sits in the bushes, and tries to remember breathing. Pete’s voice in his head, calming, _Just take it slow, Yankee, in- out- that’s right, you’re doing good son-_

    He sits and waits for Pete that night, pile of papers in the bucket in front of him. He flicks a lighter on. He thinks he might quit smoking.

    When he looks back in front of him Pete’s sitting there, cross-legged, expectant.

   It’s strange, Matt admits. It is strange. It wasn’t going to work, since it’s not an exorcism. He can see the very edges of his own furniture through Pete. He focuses on Pete instead. His coat’s missing the fourth button down. Matt remembers that Pete had kept meaning to sew it back on, how he’d bitched constantly about the Spurs lad that he’d beaten up and lost the button over, had even gotten needle and thread for it, despite Matt’s teasing, but never got around to doing it before he- and somehow that little fact, that little, _stupid_ fact, makes his chest constrict to the size of a pinhead.

   “I’m sorry,” He says, and now the tears come, and now he can’t hold them back, they come out of his chest and wrack his body in giant sobs and he can’t hold them back. Pete just looks at him, the light fallen across his face in shadow. “I’m sorry I came and I’m sorry I fucked it all up, I’m sorry, I should have told you I was a journalist-“

    He’s known all this since the day he saw Pete, walking in to Steve and Shannon’s kitchen like he owned the place. His smirk, corner of his mouth lifted. Shaven head, light glinting off his blonde stubble, the hunch of his shoulders and that proud neck, his swagger like a young wolf.  

   Pete’s worn his death like a badge all along, like a blood soaked cape and a promise to be fulfilled. Pete, Pete, always Pete, shielding him with an arm over his head, letting him in, and then leaving him. Pete marking papers with reading glasses on, bouncing the pencil against his thigh. Pete dragging him off a Millewall lad and punching them in the face and screaming bloody murder. He’s left, now. Pete’s gone. And all that’s left is Matt, who has to wade through the past months of _nonsense,_ unable to put himself back together because he’s a house with all the windows smashed in.

  He looks up at where Pete was sitting, rubbing at his eyes. He half expects Pete to be gone, but Pete was still there, looking at him with that clean cruel gaze, and smiling, a slow, happy smile lit from under by the flames.

   The next morning Matt wakes up to a pile of cold ashes. He thinks for a while, about the day ahead, the week ahead, the year ahead, and all the years after that. He thinks that glass is only dangerous when it’s been broken.

  When he finishes work for the day, he tells the manager he’s quitting. Then he buys a tape recorder.

  

-

   

   3 months later and he’s going back to Harvard. Ivy league, rubbing shoulders with a bunch of pretentious bastards who’d slit his throat in his sleep given half a chance. Almost a whole semester to repeat. The weather’s cooling enough that hanging around in Starbucks is pretty pointless, but some habits are hard to break. He buys an iced coffee anyway, chewing on the plastic straw, strolling back home with a folder full of reading that he’s planning to catch up on. He’s humming the song, _United! United! United!,_ when he suddenly senses-

    He turns around, the long echoing street behind him, hand clutching the plastic cup so hard his fingertips are frozen numb.

    But there’s no one there, just the soft, certain slope of the streetlight on the cobbled path.

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
